This summer we have been to the beach only twice, I have taken on 2 extra jobs teaching up to 10 hours a day, Parky has rented an office for her ever expanding business, Parky, myself and a mate named Sean have started a motorcycle club, Parky and I have ridden 3000 kilometres and have arse calluses to prove it and last of all we spent a week in Japan. We are both back to work today and this is the story of our summer holiday.
Everybody who knows me knows how much I love visiting Japan. It is such an orderly, clean, safe and fun place to be. For two countries so geographically near, with such a mixed (if largely unpleasant) history, who rose to be Asian economic powerhouses (Japan is the 2nd largest economy on earth, Corea the 11th), Corea and Japan are amazingly different. Japan is like Switzerland in Asia. It is rich, orderly, (ostensibly) pacifist, clean, the trains run on time and you have to re-mortgage your house to buy a ticket on them. Corea, on the other hand is more like Spain. It is simultaneously fast paced and laid back, depending on which facets of life you are talking about. It is messy, chaotic, loud, relatively inexpensive and fun. People drive like mad dogs, parking is just so random that there isn’t a proper word for it. Eating and drinking far too much are not only done, but they qualify as national pastimes. People are loud, never on time and obsessed with cultural identity. Where is a better place to live or holiday? They are apples and oranges, but I’ll do my best to give you enough information to make your own mind up.
Let’s start with verbatim reproductions of the first entries from the personals (respectively) from both the Korea Herald and Fukuoka Now publications.
50’s man living in Seoul. Wants to meet native English speaker (male) to help reading ‘Newsweek’ magazine. Korean lessons avail. Must be American or Canadian. email me at …
Pretty bisexual Japanese girl. 24. Looking for no strings attached romance. Age, race, gender irrelevant. Email me at …
Okay, that has slanted the discussion right from the start, but this is not meant to be a pros and cons discussion, it is meant to be entertaining and that qualifies in my book.
Actually that was from August last year but I still get a kick that you must be a North American male to qualify to read a magazine with him and … enough said.
My first restaurant meal in Corea (2001) consisted of Dried squid and a cup of squid broth and the second consisted entirely of frozen raw squid with chilli sauce on it. I didn’t take language lessons after that, but I did stop going to restaurants with pictures of squid on the menu. That was of course before the 2002 World Cup, things have changed a lot since then. Most menus in Corea are now written in English and well as Corean and people are a lot more used to foreigners and consequently better at explaining the menu in broken English. They also don’t tend to pretend to be closed when they see a white face as much any more. The waitresses don’t tend to hide in or behind the fridge as much. all of these things have made dining in Corea a much more pleasant experience in comparison to the pre-World Cup days.
Comparing this to our Japanese restaurant experiences, Japanese menus tend to have very little English on them at all, but they usually have colour pictures or huge plastic displays of what the food should look like in the shop windows. That is fine if it is a picture of sushi or some immediately visually-obvious meal. The problem starts with the enormous amount of wrapping involved in Japanese cuisine. “Here you can see a huge meal quite obviously wrapped in an omelette, what’s inside the omelette is where the surprise starts” or “here is a picture of a nice bowl of soup, you can see that it is either cream or broth in style, but I’m afraid we are not going to tell you what’s in it.” We only went to one restaurant that didn’t have pictures or displays, not by design but because 95% of restaurants have them. It was an interesting experience, quite reminiscent of the old days in Corea. Of the 8 or 9 staff not a single one wanted to serve us, we soon found out why. Somebody got roped into serving us after about 5 minutes, we were right in presuming that she must have been the newbie. Her English was average at best and Parky and I commented that she also seemed to be having trouble with the menu. To compound the problems it was one of those restaurants where every meal is tiny and about $3-$6. The idea is that you order a half dozen of them and share. There must have been 40 or more things to chose from and we were getting nowhere fast when we decided on combining the random point and shoot technique with the Crocodile Dundee technique “Ill have what that fat broad over there is eating”. The result was an amazing success in many different ways. We had some delicious prawns (which the hostess insisted were not prawns but sweet potatoes, the dickhead) got some baked eggplant stuffed with mince and some great sushi. We also ended up with a plate of raw red meat, we waited a little for a burner to appear but the waitress was motioning for us to squeeze a lemon on it and eat it raw so we did. it wasn’t too bad I must say. There were struggles and bumps on the way but all in all it worked, right up to when we were about to leave and our unlucky waitress sheepishly asked Parky “Are you Korean?” Parky replied in the affirmative and she responded with “So am I”. It was around this time when we began to learn about the food we had already consumed. We learned that she still thought that the prawns were sweet potatoes even in her own language and the meat we ate was, in fact, raw horsemeat. It must have been ‘Makybe Diva’ going on how much it cost.
We found our way around Japan with surprising ease considering the lack of English to help you and the lack of tourist information facilities. Corea has it over Japan hands down for tourist information, maps, signs in English and all of that stuff. Where Japan makes up for its lack of facilities is in its lack of a need for them. It is so well organised that you can quite easily just nut stuff out given a few minutes to think about it, and your average dude on the street has better English if you do need a fallback position.
We did a lot more walking in Japan than we normally do as a result of the taxis costing about $6 just to get in the door compared to $2.10 in Corea and also we didn’t have the bike. Figuring we couldn’t do much about the taxi prices, late on the second day we set about rectifying the second impediment to our non-pedestrian ambulation agenda. We hooked up with a 250cc Yamaha Majesty scooter. It was a tripper, really comfortable and super fun to ride, it also had enough storage space in it to allow us to go touring for a few days without being confined to one change of clothes.
It was magic. Kyushu (The Japanese island on which we were staying) is supremely beautiful, if not just a little wet. (I am not continuing in a comparative style, Corea is equally beautiful and given that the distance between the two is about Waikerie to Wentworth, you can imagine that they are very similar in countryside appearance.) We drove down the beach road, or as Parky named it ‘The Sunset Road” as the beach was on our west, for a day. I cannot begin to describe how great it was. The seafood was amazing and “Natty Dread” was just out of this world. The lady at Natty Dread organised us a room just a few hundred metres up the road from there. We were out in the donga a long way and the room was $50. We were paying $110 a night in Fukuoka, for a sardine can 13 floors up, a truly pathetic room at an outstanding price in such a cool city that you just don’t care. Given that, we agreed to $50 without having seen the room and we were quite surprised at its magnificence. It was just like an Aussie B&B (without the &B). It was a great room, bigger than our whole apartment in Gimhae. It had a luxurious queen size bed, 3 couches, it was pine panelled and it had an outside bathroom (not an outback dunny). The bathroom had two showerheads and a big spa just out there in the donga. Two showerheads is a great thing, I don’t mean to be too rude but this was the first shared shower I’ve ever really enjoyed in my whole life. I like to shower in basically piss warm water. When Parky showers the steam in the room burns my skin. One time while I was innocently standing in the bathroom doorway she sprayed me with her showerhead just for shits and giggles, I was like the Wicked Witch of the West, I’M MELTING I’M MELTING. I suffered burns, no shit, how can women do that to themselves. Enough of that. It was great. The next day we wanted to stay there again but they were nowhere to been seen. We went to Natty’s and the ever faithful friend rang them and they said that we could stay there again. That in itself is not very interesting, the interesting part was that when we went back a few hours later the place was open with the key in the door, the lights and air conditioner were on and the spa was hot. Nonetheless there were no people to be found. We woke up the next morning and it was (again) pissing down with rain. We sat around for three hours, waiting for the rain to stop and reading. I was reading The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara, Parky; The Chronicles Of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (in English). At 10am, during a pause in the rain we left. We had still not seen a soul the whole time we were there. We left $50 on the three legged chestnut table in the middle of the room, left the key in the door and the door open as we had found it and proceeded to fuck off, getting only slightly wet but still feeling like thieves even though we had done the right thing.
Before arriving at the pine room the second time we had scooted to Karatsu and Saga. We went to a public bath that was not between the two but between them enough, in a triangular fashion. The public bath was actually a natural hot spring that expelled from the ground high up in the mountains. Disappointingly, the men’s and the women’s were separated on different sides of the peak but it was just amazingly refreshing to be outside totally naked in a pool of hot water looking out over the valley. I have always had the feeling that being outside in the water in the nud is pretty liberating and groovy, but never has it been condoned in this fashion and toboot overlooking a rainy valley of the Kyushu it was unbeatable.
What is more, driving the tiny road (about 9 feet across) up and down the mountain chain to find the elusive hot spring we heard a BHWA-FUCKING-BWHA-WHAM. You may ask, as we did, “What the hell was that?” We soon found out as within 7 seconds it was raining so hard that I couldn’t see the road below the front wheel. Remember that we were riding a scooter and the front wheel to eyeball distance was approximately an inch or two less than 4 cubits. It was bloody pissing down. We entered a tunnel within 40 seconds of the start of the downpour and didn’t exit. We couldn’t see out of the bloody thing. We stayed in the tunnel for about 30 minutes or so. Upon leaving it started again no less than 3 minutes later and we pulled up in some farmer’s garage. This particular farmer had left his garage door open and we wailed in soaking wet. We lingered around an hour in the garage of the farmer, more than once considering stealing his family sized collection of wet weather gear. But we didn’t. We arrived at the afore mentioned outdoor spring sodding wet and in need of care. The people there were so lovely and washed and dried our clothes for free while we nuddy bathed out on the mountain. What an experience.
I love Japan, that much is obvious. Parky now insists that she had a brilliant holiday and loves Japan and its people, even though she never thought she would. (Her parents were raised in the pre-1945, brutal brutal brutal occupation of Corea by the Emperors forces. Check out your history books for the facts if you don’t really like sleeping that much anyway, because it will impede your ability to sleep, maybe forever). That much is cool. Parky isn’t one to judge one on their history, rather she takes people on a one on one basis. Her parents also don’t harbour too much ill feeling toward the Japanese, amazing considering that people of their generation were enslaved by them for 2 generations. Even the Aussies love them, maybe because they have lots of money, maybe because they are just so damn cute, maybe because we don’t hold them any more responsible for the actions of their forefathers than we do the Germans, and we all know where I stand on that issue. Either way it makes no difference, we had a great holiday. We loved the country, the people, the food, the atmosphere, the views, the traffic, the music, the everything. It was great.
Back to the comparison angle: I have always stated that I love Japan. I love being there, I love everything about it. Also I have always visited Japan at a time when I really needed a break from the craziness of Corea. For the first time I think I have a more impartial view of the two countries. I love order, cleanliness and slightly bland food. But I also love taking a taxi 120 kilometres and not really feeling a dent in the monthly paycheck. I love the reliability of a train that arrives when it say it will, I love the idea of being able to take a train simply because they exist, but I also love being able to eat three meals a day in a restaurant for less than one hours wages in total. I hate driving daily in the most dangerous traffic on the face of the earth, but I like taking a bus across the entire country for $23.
I love the anonymity that Japan offers a western tourist, we are all but ignored as one of the many, but I also like feeling special some of the time. I like being served first, I like people going out of their way to make sure you are comfortable and everything is okay with the world. I’m not super fond of hoards of schoolchildren yelling ‘hello’ at your back and following you for 5 minutes repeatedly and relentlessly yelling ‘hello’ until their throats are sore.
I passionately hate not being served a drink until the food arrives in Corea. If you order a stew you can sit dry for 30 minutes waiting to receive them together and I cannot drink a beer after I start to eat. But I love the fact that I can ingeniously get around this by helping myself to the drinks fridge which amazingly, in Corea, is almost inevitably on the customers side of the bar. I cannot figure out if Coreans are really trustworthy or if Corean bar staff are incredibly lazy. In Japan they do not and could not do this. Not because Japanese aren’t trustworthy or that they are more diligent, but because one bottle of beer cost you more than your entire meal would in Corea, quite seriously.
They both have their good points and their average points, but the one thing that this trip to Japan has really taught me is how much I really do like Corea. In the past I have viewed the peace and tranquillity of Japan as a kind of paradise haven from the madness of this country, but I am now thinking the madness is just another of its many charms.
